Just an update.. I got the speakers yesterday morning, and have been playing them almost nonstop. The tube amp proved to not have close to enough power -- it sounded sweet, but just couldn't do the job. I connected the old receiver from my college days, and it performed shockingly well! This thing is.. don't laugh.. a TEAC AG-680 that I bought in 2000 for a couple hundred bucks. It was always pretty decent, but I am still in disbelief at how well it drives the M80s. It's actually good enough that I can put off buying / building another amp for a little while.

Even though I have heard them before (and connected to better equipment than I have)... WOW!! Every single thing about my stereo is night-and-day better than before. Even the subwoofer (a Polk PSW505) sounds dramatically better, because the Axioms can get low enough to meet it at a frequency where it belongs.

My impression of the M80s is crystal clarity and effortless dynamic range. I know that sounds like the kind of generic line you would see in quotes on some speaker company's website, but it's how the sound comes across to me. I can hear everything in the music as if it were playing by itself, even when the whole audio spectrum is filled with much louder signals. Drum solos are amazing. I've seen a lot of people describe them as "bright", which would seem to imply that they favor the high end, but I really didn't get that impression at all -- if I had to use one word to describe the sound, it would be "clean".

On the downside, defects and distortion in recordings are agonizingly obvious. The M80s are NOT forgiving of poor quality recordings. At all. Some music just doesn't sound that great when you can hear all the details. Some records have intermodulation / harmonics and even clipping in them (that I never noticed before). That sounds downright horrible. More forgivable are old recordings -- mostly stuff from the 60s for me -- that are full of tape noise and missing part of the low and high end. These don't sound "bad", but it doesn't help to play a bunch of near-perfect sounding tracks before listening to them...

I totally agree about the speakers being VERY revealing of poor quality source material! Once you hear how excellent they can sound with good source material it's tough to listen to anything else. Personally I find I'm even reluctant to listen to otherwise good recordings with background tape hiss - although since I upgraded from the M80s to the LFRs they may be making this noise even more obvious. (Sort if an omnidiectional tape hiss!)

Russ, glad to hear how much you're enjoying the music through your M80s. Yes, very accurate speakers such as the Axioms reveal the blemishes in some recordings as well as the beauty in well-recorded discs. I've tried to suggest here(e.g., in the "Stunning Recordings" thread)great music, well-performed, that sounds terrific on my Axioms.

Incidentally, no need for "disbelief" as to how well the AG-680 drives the M80s. They're average to slightly above average in sensitivity and don't have any special amplification needs. Assuming that the AG-680 is still in good operating condition, its 100 watt per channel rating is plenty for providing safe(to your hearing) sound levels. Newer units with more up-to-date features are available, of course, but simply from the standpoint of transparent amplification, what you have is fine.

You know your speakers are doing their job, when you start mistaking sound effects in music for actual sounds in the room!

Lampshade -- my tube amp is only good for about 10 watts (average RMS, while playing music). It does sound great with these speakers, but can't really do it for that particular room. I will definitely find a home for it though.

On another note, enjoying music in the car or at the computer has gotten harder!

Congratulations on your purchase, I had previously owned the M80, both the Ti and v2 for several years and it is an excellent speaker. You will get many happy years to come out of them. I had driven them with several different amplifiers, including a tube amp that I believe was rated for 35wpc which did a remarkably good job of driving them. It has been my experience that they really do not start to shine until you turn them up and feed them some wattage though